Why is it so hard to learn critical thinking skills? Traditional
textbooks focus almost exclusively on logic and fallacious
reasoning, ignoring two crucial problems. As psychologists have
demonstrated recently, many of our mistakes are not caused by
formal reasoning gone awry, but by our bypassing it completely. We
instead favor more comfortable, but often unreliable, intuitive
methods. Second, the evaluation of premises is of fundamental
importance, especially in this era of fake news and politicized
science. This highly innovative text is psychologically informed,
both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching
students how to watch out for and work around their natural
intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from
epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for
learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer
for real world critical thinking. The authors bring over four
combined decades of classroom experience and a fresh approach to
the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course:
effectively explaining the nature of validity, assessing deductive
arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments,
and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss
in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including
testimony, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and
dialectical argumentation. Key Features and Benefits: Uses
contemporary psychological explanations of, and remedies for,
pervasive errors in belief formation. There is no other critical
thinking text that generally applies this psychological approach.
Assesses premises, notably premises based on the testimony of
others, and evaluation of news and other information sources. No
other critical thinking textbook gives detailed treatment of this
crucial topic. Typically, they only provide a few remarks about
when to accept expert opinion / argument from authority. Carefully
explains the concept of validity, paying particular attention in
distinguishing logical possibility from other species of
possibility, and demonstrates how we may mistakenly judge invalid
arguments as valid because of belief bias. Instead of assessing an
argument's validity using formal/mathematical methods (i.e., truth
tables for propositional logic and Venn diagrams for categorical
logic), provides one technique that is generally applicable:
explicitly showing that it is impossible to make the conclusion
false and the premises true together. For instructors who like the
more formal approach, the text also includes standard treatments
using truth tables and Venn diagrams. Uses frequency trees and the
frequency approach to probability more generally, a simple method
for understanding and evaluating quite complex probabilistic
information Uses arguments maps, which have been shown to
significantly improve students' reasoning and argument evaluation
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
